


road rules

by irrelevant



Category: Prometheus (2012)
Genre: Crack, Elizabeth and David's fucked up yet excellent adventure, Gen, Humor, I has a keyboard, Other, you should probably take it away
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-23
Updated: 2012-06-23
Packaged: 2017-11-08 08:44:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/441335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irrelevant/pseuds/irrelevant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>‘You do understand that before you inject, insert, or implant anything into me, you need my permission to do so?’</p>
            </blockquote>





	road rules

**Author's Note:**

> this is utter crack, guys. not meant to be taken seriously.

i.  
‘We’ve achieved geosynchronous orbit,’ he tells you while you’re still trying to vomit up what feels like both of your lungs, with some success. ‘Readings indicate numerous individual life forms, though not what stage of evolution that life may have attained.’

You pull the blanket he just draped around your shoulders in tighter and attempt to make the last few minutes make sense. This time, success is negligible. ‘What?’

‘Earth wasn’t their only seed colony,’ he says with that plastic good cheer that’s always made your skin crawl. ‘This one was the closest to LV-223. The engineers are, unfortunately, not from this galaxy, and by the time we reached their home world, even in hypersleep you would have long since been reduced to particles. I trust that as an archaeologist you’re familiar with the process?’

You open your eyes and stare at him. ‘Oh,’ you say.

‘They terraformed and accelerated the evolutionary development of this planet. Some schools of thought believe that by viewing the creation you may learn to know the creator.’

‘I’ve already seen earth,’ you say flatly.

‘Perhaps a different beginning will provide you with a different perspective?’ He smiles.

‘Please don’t do that again,’ you say.

His simulated confusion is more genuine than the smile. ‘What should I not do?’

‘Your facial expression,’ you say. ‘It’s not a good, um, rendition. Of real life. Unless you’re trying to look like a wild animal trying to scare another wild animal away.’

‘Ah,’ he says. ‘My apologies. I will attempt to correct my error.’

‘No,’ you say quickly, ‘don’t. It’s fine. Just don’t do it. At all. Please?’

He says, ‘It’s my pleasure to be of service,’ and goes as blank as a store mannequin.

 

‘David,’ you say three hot, humid days of being chased by ambulatory bipedal alligators later, ‘I think we’ve viewed enough.’

‘Are you certain?’ he says. ‘We’ve not yet explored the southern hemisphere.’

‘Thank you for offering,’ you say, ‘but I’m very certain.’

You trudge along in silence, panting and sweating. The air feels like water in your lungs and on your skin and all around you myriad species of winged insects buzz in the shadows of bizarre, blue trees. You feel sure they’re trying to decide whether or not your blood will taste as sweet as it smells before making the attempt. The insects, not the trees. The trees are fine, if a bit eerie, or at least they would be without their current inhabitants.

Something glides by overhead on gauzy green wings. David watches its flight with the same expression he was wearing yesterday when he told you he admired your well-developed drive for self-preservation, possibly due to the fact that you were able to pace him for almost a minute while outrunning the alligators.

Alligators. Survival instincts. Oh dear God.

‘David,’ you say, ‘you haven’t… taken samples of anything. Have you?’

He looks away from the gauze-wing to you. He says, ‘They are not of much interest. Not very different to similar earth specimens and none of them is of an acceptable genome.’

You stop walking. He does as well, saying, ‘Dr Shaw? Are you well?’

‘What do you mean, genome?’ you croak. Additionally, ‘ _Acceptable_?’ You sound like one of the enormous, frog-like lizards that tried to eat you last night.

The buzzing in your ears is growing. If you turned round, there would be an army of carnivorous insects, waiting.

David says, ‘Dr Shaw, you really don’t look well. Allow me to assist you.’ You feel his arm go round you and the buzz swells again. Your vision telescopes, leaving you with his calm mouth and curious eyes at the other end.

You say, ‘I think I would like to go back to space now,’ and then your eyes splinter into multi-coloured butterfly-shaped light and fly away. 

 

‘Elizabeth.’ David’s voice is quiet and the wet cloth on your forehead is cool. The room is blessedly dim when you open your eyes.

There isn’t a blue tree in sight. You never thought you’d be glad to see the engineers’ handiwork again, but then, before this week you hadn’t been chased through strangely-coloured swamps by hostile alligators, either.

For a fraction of a moment, you wish Charlie had been the one to live. This is the kind of thing he came all the way out here for. It feels wrong for you to be living his life and dreams alongside a synthetic you don’t trust as far as you can throw him.

It isn’t very far. Before you reattached his head, you did it twice.

‘Elizabeth,’ David says again. His fingers touch the pulse on the underside of your left elbow.

‘How long have I been out?’ you croak.

‘Five earth days,’ he says. ‘We are on course to the next star system.’

‘What?’ you hear yourself say. ‘That’s not—we were just down there, I was—’ You try to sit up, but he presses down firmly on your diaphragm. Not hard, but with enough force to let you know that it could become more.

‘Please remain stationary,’ he says, ‘the fever is gone, but you have not eaten in five days.’

Why does he always have to look so bloody calm? ‘Fever?’ you say weakly.

‘It’s most likely you were bitten by what was probably some species of insect, judging by the hives on your back and neck. I administered a universal antitoxin, which caused them to subside.’

You would nod your understanding, but your head feels rather like an explosion in the making. You settle for saying, ‘I knew they were out to get me.’

 

‘The next planet is here,’ he says, and touches the control pad. A planet on the far right side of the orrery turns incandescent and floats toward you. You catch it, cup it in your hands, but all you feel is a slight, pleasantly electric sensation.

‘How long?’ you ask.

‘Two years, twenty-six days.’

You blow out a long breath. Between your hands, the small world hums, caught in its strange power current. You let it go and it floats back to its system, resuming its path around a sun not very different from Sol.

Behind you, you can feel him watching you. You half turn, looking at him over your shoulder. ‘The pod?’

You replenished your water stores on what you’ll always think of as the Planet of the Alligators and Evil Stinging Things That Were Out To Get Me, but you didn’t have time to look for anything edible. The engineer food packs expired two thousand years ago, and even if you stretch one MRE out over the course of forty-eight hours it won’t be long before you’re running low.

‘I’m sorry, Elizabeth,’ he says. He sounds sincere, but he’s good at sounding sincere, especially when he’s telling you that the best thing for you is to let the tentacled alien thing inside you gestate to term.

‘We can go back,’ he says quietly. ‘Or to one of the colonies. No one will fault you for your actions.’

The funny thing is, he usually says exactly what you need to hear, even if what you heard wasn’t what he intended to say.

‘No,’ you tell him, and you turn back to the blue, gently turning world. ‘I owe this to them.’

He’s silent, not offering anything more than he needs to. You’re used to that by now.

 

You grab his wrist before he can touch the indent that activates the pod. ‘Wake me up before we get there.’

‘Certainly,’ he says. ‘Four or five days will—’

‘No,’ you say, ‘I mean a month or so before.’ He cocks his head slightly to one side. ‘I’d like more than a few days to acclimate, and I—’

You can’t finish, mostly because you don’t have any idea what you want to say. You don’t know what you _want_.

‘Please,’ you say, and he says, ‘Yes, of course. Please lay back, Elizabeth.’

Someday, you think, you won’t come out at the other end of the long sleep. Someday his face through distorted, alien plas is going to be the last thing you see.

If you don’t get eaten first, that is.

 

ii.  
Ok, that really might have been a lung, this time.

‘Eventually,’ you gasp, ‘I’m going to get the hang of this.’

He wipes your sweaty forehead with a piece of cloth that looks like it’s wiped up God knows what else. Then he wipes the corner of your mouth. The corner of _his_ mouth twitches when you jerk back. You follow this ill-advised move up by vomiting bile all over the front of his olive drab uniform shirt.

‘My, my,’ he says, ‘That isn’t going to clean at all well.’

You gasp out, ‘Please don’t make me laugh,’ and your stomach hurts and your lungs give new meaning to raw and the rest of you doesn’t feel so spectacular either, but his mouth is twitching again and there’s a vomit-free area near his shoulder that looks very solid. You lean forward, and it feels as solid as it looks.

‘I missed you,’ you mumble into his shirt, and then you wish you could take back the last fifteen minutes entirely.

‘That is highly unlikely,’ he says. ‘You were unconscious.’

You straighten enough to see his face. ‘You mean you don’t know?’

‘How could I?’

‘I thought you,’ you make a note not to swallow again until you’ve rinsed your mouth out and drunk a gallon of water, ‘I thought you watched my dreams.’

He doesn’t answer and you look up and into the water pouch he’s holding out to you. ‘I left the interface on the Prometheus,’ he says as you take the pouch. ‘The engineers have no equivalent technology.’

You think this is not the time for a fistpump. Charlie would have told you that any time is the time for a fistpump, but Charlie is not the one sitting on a weird alien slab in his underwear with a creepy-looking synthetic peering down at him as though he's a specimen under a microscope.

The creepy looking synthetic pulls your cross and Charlie’s ring out of his pocket by their chain and fastens them around your neck. You rinse your mouth out and then attempt to inhale the rest of the water, and then there is… a sound. It’s not a human sound. That is, it isn’t a sound a human would make, nor is it a sound a human would manufacture.

You look at David. He looks at you.

‘What,’ you say, ‘is that?’

‘I am uncertain,’ he says, ‘but if I were to advance a theory,’ (he says the word like it tastes bad), ‘I would suggest a proximity alarm.’

You take another swallow of water. The alarm is still sounding. ‘What exactly does that mean? I mean,’ you clarify, ‘what will the direct result be for us?’

‘I should think,’ he says, ‘that we are about to have company. Or perhaps we have disturbed the trajectory of a rogue comet.’

You finish the water and reach for another pouch. ‘If it's all the same to you, I think I'll have option one, please. And some clothes. And a litre of mouthwash.’

 

The engineers didn’t go in for view ports or screens, so you have to settle for a fairly decent three dimensional hologram of the Intruder. It rotates slowly in place above the dais and both of you stare at it.

It’s another ship. It’s patently not from earth. Neither does it look like something an engineer would design.

‘Should I hail them?’ David asks.

You stop staring at the ship in favour of staring at him. ‘Are we capable of hailing them?’

‘I believe so, yes,’ he says. You look away when he starts manipulating the central control panel. You don’t know why watching him at the controls makes you feel like you’re viewing something obscene, and you don’t care. Neither do you look. Instead, you listen to the steady stream of sounds coming in over the communications system. It might be language. It might be cats being strangled.

David listens for a few minutes before replying.

Definitely strangling cats.

‘David?’ you say.

He breaks off his conversation to say, ‘I believe I have ascertained their intent, Elizabeth, if you wouldn’t mind waiting a few moments,’ before turning back to the console and snarling something you aren’t sure you want a translation for.

He’s working the console in between snarls, and as you watch, a new array of lights appears over the bridge. These are red and they form a web of connected dots over the holographic shape of the other ship.

A long, almost continuous snarl issues from… somewhere. The bridge is huge and it echoes and makes any noise sound like it’s coming from everywhere and nowhere.

David snarls back and presses something. For a long moment, nothing happens. Then the holographic ship explodes. Since this is David, it's probably safe to assume the actual ship followed suit.

‘Oh my God.’ That was you. You felt your vocal chords vibrate. It didn’t sound like you, but— ‘Oh my _God_.’ Now that sounds a bit more like you. Well, you as you are now, not earth you. Because earth you would never say, would never _need_ to say something like, ‘David, you _blew them up_!’

‘Yes,’ he agrees. Carefully, he pushes the hair hanging down into his face back into its precise wave. ‘They had hostile intentions.’

You stagger over to the console and slump into it, propping your arms on the edge and leaning your forehead down between them, resting it against the oddly cool, ridged surface. Your voice is muffled by your skin and the console. ‘And you knew this how?’

‘They indicated that they did in so many words.’

‘Oh,’ you say. You seem to say that to him a lot.

Your knees choose that moment to stop working. There's a few interesting and not very stable seconds, and at the end of them you're on your arse on the deck with your back against the console. David is speaking quietly to the console in the engineer language. It's surprisingly soothing, so much so that it must relax you enough to fall asleep. That's what you think later, in any case, because you don’t remember standing and walking through the corridors to the pallet of blankets laid neatly out in a room you’ve slept in perhaps a month’s worth of nights, but that’s where you wake up.

 

He has a makeshift lab now. You’re not sure whether to be worried or not. At least he’s not using one of their old ones. He’s taken what you think looks like a ready room (strange, fluid-looking bench seating built into the periphery of the room, holographic platform in the centre) and made it a perfect mess of things he’s taken from other parts of the ship, bits and bobs of earth tech you salvaged from the ATVs, and something that looks like an engineer/earth hybrid electrical cord crossed with an umbilical cord.

You really don’t want to know what he uses that for. As it is, you’ll probably dream about it tonight, which is not a good thought but not a wholly bad one because he will never watch your dreams again and, well, maybe a small fistpump would be permissible. Sometime soon. Where he can’t see you.

Thankfully, you see nothing even remotely resembling a cylinder. You lean in the open port and watch him dissect something you’re positive came from the Planet of the Alligators and Evil Stinging Things That Were Out To Get Me and you say, ‘I thought you said you hadn’t taken any samples.’ Pushing away from the bulkhead, you wander around piles of gutted tech and other less wholesome detritus toward the long rows of benches set around the room.

‘No,’ David says, ‘I did not say that.’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘I did not.’

‘All right,’ you say, pushing a pile of cloth (so that’s where he got the rag from) off a bench and taking its place, ‘what did you say?’

He puts down the tool he’s holding and tilts his head to look at you. His eyes are blank, searching—literally, you think. He’s retrieving the conversation from his memory files.

‘I said they were not very interesting and that none of them was of an acceptable genome,’ he says finally. ‘I did not say I had not taken any samples. But,’ he adds, ‘I’m not at present studying or manipulating genetic material.’

‘Well, when you get round to it, ask before you decide to use me as a guinea pig.’ He looks like he’s considering it. ‘David,’ you say, ‘joke.’

It’s nice to hear him say, ‘Oh,’ for a change.

You’re sensing it’s time for yet another discussion on the topic of personal boundaries. ‘You do understand that before you inject, insert, or implant anything into me, you need my permission to do so?’

‘Yes,’ he says, and blinks.

‘Good,’ you say, ‘I’m very pleased to hear it. How far out are we now?’

‘As the star drive is presently disengaged, thirty-three days.’

‘That’s good,’ you say again. You’re not entirely sure what you mean by that.

 

‘David,’ you say a week later.

‘Yes, Elizabeth?’

‘Remember what I said about injecting, inserting, implanting or otherwise putting anything inside me without asking?’

‘Yes?’

‘I wasn’t joking.’

‘I'm certain you weren't.’

‘Good,’ you say, ‘I’m glad you're certain you understood, although I’m not quite sure you did. Because if you did understand, then I don’t understand why there’s a tracking strip embedded in my hip.’

You fold your arms over your chest and glare at him across the round holo platform he’s been using as his lab table.

He gives you the blankest, least guilty look you’ve ever seen on any face—human, synthetic, or extraterrestrial—and he says, ‘Oops. Sorry.’

He compounds his error by adding, ‘However, I didn’t believe it necessary to consult you when implementing an obvious safety measure,’ in the same calm, condescending, patronising tone every male of every sentient species adopts at some point in their idiotic careers.

A bubble of laughter is rising in your chest. You tamp it down and say, ‘You’re such a bloody man.’

He blinks. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘They always think they know best,’ you tell him, and then you do laugh because he does affronted at least as well as a human male.

 

He walks into the dry-storage room (well, you hope it was a dry-storage room) you’re using as a lounge and stands there, waiting for you to acknowledge him. He adopted the behaviour after you told him that if he didn’t stop interrupting you whenever he fancied, you’d sear his head off with a laser scalpel and this time you’d leave it off.

Sometimes if you ignore him when he does this, he’ll go away. This doesn’t appear to be one of those times.

You sigh and push the converted reader away. It’s stuck on an engineer war drama, as far as you can tell (or maybe actual history? Your understanding of the language is improving but still uneven in places) and not a very good one at that. ‘What is it, David?’

‘You said I was… like a man.’ He tilts his head in that confused way that looks more birdlike than anything else. The lines on his forehead—calculated by humans to make him appear more like them—deepen. ‘Does this mean you consider me to be human?’

You shake your head. ‘No, David. It means I consider you to be a person.’

The look on his face is indescribable. At least, to you it is. Maybe another synthetic would understand. Then it clears and the corners of his mouth turn up slightly.

‘As much as I'm able, I return the sentiment.’ He pauses. ‘We are… friends?’

Oh God. ‘Yes, David. I suppose that’s one word for it.’

His forehead furrows slightly. ‘Friends do things for one another out of fondness, I believe?’

‘Yes, David.’

His expression clears. ‘In that instance, may I—’

‘No, David.’

 

He sulks for two weeks. Of course, he denies doing anything so _human_ categorically.

‘I am a synthetic,’ he tells you. ‘I'm incapable of experiencing emotion that would lead me to behave in such an irrational manner.’

There is a distinct, silent suggestion of, ‘And thank heaven for it.’ Or rather, thank whatever belief system synthetics subscribe to.

‘Sulking,’ you tell him.

He doesn’t stalk away. He doesn’t even say anything nasty (something of which he’s perfectly capable). You check your food and water, your sitting and sleeping areas carefully for the rest of the day.

He sees you doing it and his nose inches higher into the air until he’s looking at you down the bridge of it. Not that he doesn’t already look down at you, he’s got at least a foot on you height-wise, but there’s looking down and looking down on.

There’s definite ‘on’ in his looking down.

 

The sulk that is not lasts another week and a half. Then you arrive at SD-115 (you agreed on Shaw-David instead of David-Shaw as a designation), otherwise known as the planet of sentient, flying jellyfish.

David is staring and practically glowing and—and _smiling_ , and it looks real, not one of those plastic imitations he used to give you before you told him to stop.

‘Elizabeth,’ he breathes, ‘they are perfect.’

Oh dear.


End file.
